Bioactive Natural Products: The Potential Sources of New Drugs
A special issue of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049). This special issue belongs to the section "Natural Products Chemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2026 | Viewed by 130
Special Issue Editors
Interests: cardiovascular diseases; chronic inflammation-related diseases including cancer; health studies of medicinal plants; medicinal and psychedelic mushrooms for their development as potential drug therapeutic agents
Interests: development of drug/natural product, indigenous knowledge; purification, isolation and structure elucidation of active constituents from plants in various therapeutic areas
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to invite you to contribute to a Special Issue with the title “Bioactive Natural Products: The Potential Sources of New Drugs”.
Bioactive compounds and natural compounds found in herbs, foods and other natural sources continue to offer potential multiplicity of incredible potency that has proven to be of great potential benefit especially for the management of non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, and cancers with inflammation at the midpoint, which are known as the worldwide leading cause of death and disability. In addition, they are also known as chronic diseases that result from a combination of genetic, physiological, behavioral and environmental factors. Natural products were once at the center of drug discovery. Today, however, the field has made remarkable progress with the emergence of diverse novel drug modalities. Nevertheless, small- and medium-molecule drugs derived from natural sources remain indispensable in modern drug discovery due to their many practical advantages, including oral bioavailability, relatively low cost, and ease of chemical modification. Additionally, the structural diversity of natural products contributes to the expansion of chemical space in target-based drug discovery. This collection seeks to unveil all these novel progressions especially towards their effective developments into new drugs with the potential to combat chronic diseases that continue to burden the health and pharmaceutic systems. As bioactive natural products emerge as a great source of novel therapeutic leads, there are, however, challenges in their use for drug discovery that still need to be explored, especially with regards to their screening, isolation, characterization and optimization. Many novel strategies are in place globally, enforcing multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary innovation research focuses on bringing forth measures to overcome these challenges. These factors will be explored at various levels in this Special Issue, in an effort to scientifically report, discover, improve and facilitate their development as potential therapeutic agents. Moreover, their safety and efficacy remain an important key issue that still needs to be completely considered and established. Consequently, evidence of pharmacological evaluation, biological evaluations of bioactive natural drug products as potential drug agents are vital key points that will be researched and demonstrated at different levels to properly establish bioactive natural products as potential sources of new drugs and also enable their integration into modern-day medicinal practices.
This Special Issue aims at providing the current state of the art on the use of bioactive natural products as potential source of new drugs, and at evaluating their safety in vivo and in vitro.
In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Extraction, isolation and characterization of bioactive compounds from plant and mushroom extracts.
- Evaluation of bioactive natural products’ safety by exploring various factors including cell cytotoxicity, cell–cell interactions, intracellular activity, and cell–environment interactions.
- Investigations into the mechanisms of action used by bioactive natural products, effects on proteins and gene expression studies.
- Evaluation of bioactive natural products in-vivo and in vitro studies as potential therapeutic drugs.
- Evaluation of bioactive natural products on biological parameters.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Sanah Nkadimeng
Dr. Gerda Fouchè
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Molecules is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- bioactive natural compounds
- chemical characterization and optimization
- bioactive natural products’ safety
- cytotoxicity
- bioactive natural products’ mechanisms of action
- biological activities in vitro and in vivo
- chronic diseases
- bioactive natural product in non-communicable diseases-chronic inflammation/chronic stress/drug discovery/anticancer
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